The Crossing by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

The devil took his own legs; but he had the horse’s legs.
    Riflemen? Didn’t he understand that riflemen were no good for fighting a war? Didn’t he remember what had happened in Brooklyn and again in New York?
    It was an accident. A rifleman was the finest fighting man on earth. His Maryland Rifles could hit a bee’s eye at a hundred yards.
    In the end, Washington let him go. It took two men to lift Billy Smallwood onto his horse, and off he rode to Maryland to find men for the army, his face full of pain and his heart full of hope. Yet he found some men, and came back not with a thousand but with a full hundred.
    Perhaps the Virginian understood Smallwood full well. In a manner of speaking, he was wracked with his own pain; yet he had done what a man can do. If he had reached the bottom ground of his existence, it was not all bad; he had learned something about love and comradeship, and perhaps he was more content than we might imagine. He was defending his native land with no hope of gain, and the tedious argument of right and wrong that the politicians played was no longer his burden or concern. He understood the unexplainable, that the only holy ground is that place where a man lives and breathes, his mother the earth, which he must defend. The only award that still awaited him was either the loneliness of a British jail or the shameful ignominy of a gallows tree, depending upon the mood of those who pronounced sentence upon him. He was more imaginative than many of his friends believed, yet he could not conjure up any real hope of ever again being what he loved most, a peaceful householder in his beautiful home on the Potomac. The things that had mattered so deeply to him and which had made life a warm and generous thing, the riding to hounds, the designing of his gardens, the planting and transplanting, the gambling at whist, the flute that he practiced for hours behind closed doors—all of this was gone and most likely forever.
    Yet he had a sort of repayment. He had stood face to face with eternity, and he was still alive and alert and surrounded by people who loved him.

[16]
    WHEN OLD ISRAEL PUTNAM ARRIVED in Philadelphia on the next day, Tuesday, the tenth of December, he was told that carts were being loaded in front of the lodgings of practically every member of the Continental Congress—in spite of the fact that newspapers the same day carried indignant denials by Congress that it might be preparing to flee.
    Putnam confronted them. Like so many men in the thirteen colonies, the members of Congress had a conviction that they were first on the British list of “those traitors promptly to be hanged.” It was one thing for John Hancock to write his name so large on the Declaration of Independence that King George could read it without his glasses. That was in the warm summer days of July, when twenty thousand men stood to arms under the leadership of Washington; it was something else entirely in the cold December, with only a few thousand shivering men on the banks of the Delaware standing between Congress and the gallows. But then they were not alone in their self-esteem. Hundreds of others shared their conviction of a high priority on the British hanging list, and they demanded of Putnam what he intended to do.
    He answered to the effect that he would do his duty.
    Would he defend Philadelphia?
    If it could be defended.
    And if it could not?
    Then he would do what a man could do, Putnam answered sourly. He would not run away. He had made his peace with the Almighty, and that was all that a man could do. Jehovah asked no more.
    The congressmen felt that it was all very well to talk about Jehovah in Massachusetts or Maine, which was more or less His natural habitat, but this was Philadelphia. But Putnam would not be shaken. They would do well to unload their baggage. He would have no more talk of abandoning the city to the British. And he would like them to offer a substantial